Each one moves singly. To join the movements of others is harmful until you have moved yourself. Movement is with the whole of you. Ideas come afterwards. How much time had passed? Only a moment or two. The chairman was still bleating. And they had not noticed her inattention. They were sitting in a row at the back of the hall. The proceedings seemed very far away. Held off by their nearness to each other, by the way after one short hour and in spite of their incompatibilities, they were, when placed amongst strangers, in touch with each other. It was worth while. Worth while to miss the intensities. To be happily surrounded. And this way, the social and domestic way of meeting things, the cool easy way of normal people, was perhaps the best way. It robbed things of all but their obvious surfaces, the practical data of life. Reduced them to the terms of what could be said about them and handed round from one to the other. Small wonder that reformers tended to become tub-thumpers, so immense must be the resistance offered by people living as nearly everyone did, in groups, closely related and drawn this way and that by perpetual single instances. Less wonder that most people assumed the fact of life, took it without amazement, for granted, so thinly of necessity was spread their awareness of anything whatever. Homeopathic. She gave herself up to joy in her party, in being linked with them in profane, mirthful detachment from all that was going forward, shockingly accompanied by the crackling of Michael’s disgraceful bag of hardbake. Was it her fault that they were so detached? The result of some demoralising influence at work behind her imagined interest in socialism? She felt it was not. They were all on a moral holiday, not only from their own worlds, but from any world whatsoever. Happy in being together, passing through an uncalculated interval, a strange small time that they would remember with pleasure. 5 Going homewards through the spring evening with Densley she felt the world even further off; thin, irrelevant. That was his influence. For him the world was something against which everyone was fighting with weapons feeble or stout. Single people, the individual battle, that was the centre of his preoccupation. His interest in Mrs. Wheeler was his sense that she was making a good fight, sturdily, perhaps unscrupulously ... that she was what he would call a real woman. Herself he regarded as so far unreal, good material for reality, holding back. His wide, varied experience of humanity seemed all about them, as they wandered at truce arm-in-arm through the darkened evening streets. And she found herself, as always, leaning upon his ordered knowledge and yet repudiating it, so entirely did it imply an incomplete conception of life. Every symbol he used called up the image of life as process, never in any direction as completeness.